Sunday, November 12, 2006

Sunday Poet: Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz is one of my favorite poets, and also one of the most important poets of the 20th Century. A couple of years ago, his New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 came out from Penguin Modern Classics. The Guardian (UK) ran a review of the book when it was published:

Czeslaw Milosz is one of the most significant poets of the 20th century and this collection, brilliantly translated from the Polish and covering 70 years of work, stands as a towering achievement, a tremendous act of sustained witnessing.

Milosz was born in 1911 on the borders of Poland and Lithuania, studied at the University of Vilnius and was in Warsaw during most of the second world war. He left Poland in 1951 and taught for many years at the University of Berkeley in California. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1980 and died in 2004.

You can read the rest at their site.

Here is some more biography from the Nobel Prize committee when they announced Milosz as the winner in 1980:
Disruption and schism between incompatible loyalties, and the abandonment of shattered cultural and social patterns, have marked Milosz's life from the very beginning. In both an outward and an inward sense, he is an exiled writer - a stranger for whom the physical exile is really a reflection of a metaphysical, or even religious, spiritual exile applying to humanity in general. The world that Milosz depicts in his poetry and prose works and essays is the world in which man lives after having been driven out of paradise. But the paradise from which he has been banished is not any bleating idyll, but a genuine Old Testament eden, for better or worse, with the serpent as a rival for supremacy. The destructive and treacherous forces are mingled with the good and creative ones - both are equally true and present. The tensions and contrasts are typical of Milosz's art and outlook on life. There has often been mention of a Manichaean streak in him, and he himself had admitted it. According to him, one of the writer's most important tasks is, in fact, ouvrir à celui qui le lit une dimension qui rend l'affaire de vivre plus passionante. "From galactic silence protect us" and show us "how difficult it is to remain just one person". There is much of the preacher's or Pascal's fervour in him - a passionate striving to make us intensely aware that we actually have been driven out of a paradise and are living scattered abroad, and that there is no paradise but that evil and havoc are forces to combat. To look reality in the face is not to see everything in darkness and give up in gloom and despair, nor is it to see everything in light and to lapse into escapism and delusion. Still less is it to blur the contours and the focus in favour of convenience or compromise. Tension, discord, passion, contrast - the living exile and the diaspora, at once freely acknowledged and enforced, are the true meaning of our human condition.
Milosz has been an important poet, along with Octavio Paz, in shaping a vision of the transformation of consciousness from Marxism to democracy. Both poets lived through revolutions and both were at one time aligned with communism in some way. But each found his way to a bigger worldview, and documented that shift through their body of work.

Milosz was much more European in his experience and influences. His work contains, nearly always, a spiritual undertone that sometimes becomes the theme itself. As the Nobel press release acknowledges, Milosz sought the balance between shadow and light in the human psyche, in his own.
A Poem For the End of the Century

When everything was fine
And the notion of sin had vanished
And the earth was ready
In universal peace
To consume and rejoice
Without creeds and utopias,

I, for unknown reasons,
Surrounded by the books
Of prophets and theologians,
Of philosophers, poets,
Searched for an answer,
Scowling, grimacing,
Waking up at night, muttering at dawn.

What oppressed me so much
Was a bit shameful.
Talking of it aloud
Would show neither tact nor prudence.
It might even seem an outrage
Against the health of mankind.

Alas, my memory
Does not want to leave me
And in it, live beings
Each with its own pain,
Each with its own dying,
Its own trepidation.

Why then innocence
On paradisal beaches,
An impeccable sky
Over the church of hygiene?
Is it because that
Was long ago?

To a saintly man
--So goes an Arab tale--
God said somewhat maliciously:
"Had I revealed to people
How great a sinner you are,
They could not praise you."

"And I," answered the pious one,
"Had I unveiled to them
How merciful you are,
They would not care for you."

To whom should I turn
With that affair so dark
Of pain and also guilt
In the structure of the world,
If either here below
Or over there on high
No power can abolish
The cause and the effect?

Don't think, don't remember
The death on the cross,
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture.

Totally enigmatic.
Impossibly intricate.
Better to stop speech here.
This language is not for people.
Blessed be jubilation.
Vintages and harvests.
Even if not everyone
Is granted serenity.

*****

Ars Poetica?

I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though its an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with thehelp of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

*****

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago.Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

*****

Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

*****

What Does It Mean

It does not know it glitters
It does not know it flies
It does not know it is this not that.

And, more and more often, agape,
With my Gauloise dying out,
Over a glass of red wine,
I muse on the meaning of being this not that.

Just as long ago, when I was twenty,
But then there was a hope I would be everything,
Perhaps even a butterfly or a thrush, by magic.
Now I see dusty district roads
And a town where the postmaster gets drunk every day
Melancholy with remaining identical to himself.

If only the stars contained me.
If only everything kept happening in such a way
That the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh.
Were I at least not contradictory. Alas.

*****
Czeslaw Milosz on the web:
Wikipedia entry
Poem Hunter
An interview in The Georgia Review
Nobel Prize site
Poet Seers
Poetry Chaikhana


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